


Moving On

by AmyNChan



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Gen, Several years later, everyone's moved on, past relationship, talking things out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 01:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18511084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmyNChan/pseuds/AmyNChan
Summary: Two friends meet up in person for the first time in a long time.  Grown up conversations about moving on ensue.





	Moving On

Paris, as a whole, hadn’t changed.

Tourists strolled down the streets, sunlight filtered through whatever clouds hung in the sky, and storefronts enticed locals and foreigners alike inside so they could sell their wares.  The paved streets were sidelined with greenery and sleeping lights would wait until twilight to twinkle.

She had spent the first few days getting reacquainted with her childhood home.  When the opportunity had presented itself to return, she knew she had to take it.  She had visited the Louvre, reexperienced the Eiffel Tower, and, finally, visited the place where her parents had once worked.

They had since upsized and couldn’t have remained on 112 Gotlib street with the amount of business they had garnered.  While they now had more hired hands and more space, every single pastry of theirs was still handmade, still delicious, and still came straight from her parents’ souls.  She knew this because she had visited them after her trip down memory lane.

After her parents, there was only one person still in Paris who she wanted to see.  Alya and Nino had decided that the sedimentary lifestyle wasn’t for them.  They toured the globe hunting stories and bringing music wherever they went.  Ivan and Mylene had also moved, but only a few miles east of Paris.  They had always been in pursuit of a quieter lifestyle, metal music notwithstanding.  Juleka and Rose still lived in Paris, but were vacationing by the beach.  They’d sent their love.  Kim, Max, and Alix had all scattered to the winds.  Olympic swimmer, certified genius, and owner of the world’s largest skate park, the trio did seem odd at times, but they seemed to make their lives work.  Nathanael had moved to California.  Last she heard, he was still working his way up, but he seemed happy.  Sabrina had studied abroad and remained in Germany, where officer Rodger had swiftly followed.  And there was honestly no reason to see Chloé.  Much less Lila.

No, she sat in this café, waiting—as patiently as she could—for Adrien.

Adrien, for whom she had much respect and shared such a deep bond with.  They hadn’t been out of contact since she left.  They messaged whenever life permitted them and kept fairly up-to-date on the happenings of the other’s life.  They shared good news, bad news, and sometimes just shared what they thought the other might find funny.  Even at their age, he still sent cat memes.  The dork.

She watched the door open to the café and a blond head ducked in.  She noticed the empty space on his right ring finger and was reminded of her similarly empty earlobes.  Of a bygone life.

“Adrien!” She rose an arm so he could make her out more easily.  When he saw her, he smiled and made his way over.  She lowered her arm.  “What brings you to a place like this?”

“I don’t know,” said the man, sliding into his seat.  “I got some sort of weird message from a friend.  Said they had something to talk about.”  Adrien turned his green eyes towards her with false accusation.  “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“What?  Me?” asked Marinette, placing a hand upon her heart.  “You wound me!”

Adrien chuckled.  “Guess I couldn’t be lucky enough to get it on the first try.”

“No,” said Marinette, choosing to gloss over his word choice.  “No, you couldn’t.”

The two of them sat for a moment.  She knew he was cataloguing all the differences.  All the little things that had changed over the years.  Her hair, for example, was cut much shorter.  She’d grown.  And whatever tiny differences she knew he would find.

He, for example, changed heavily in her eyes.  Gone was the baby fat that had still tailed him in lycreé.  His hair was just a touch longer, a bit more wild.  His eyes shone with…something.  Freedom?  Joy?  Whatever it was, it made him look younger than he actually was.  She was glad.  It suited him.

“What?” Adrien grinned.  “Checking me-owt?”

The words, once filled with heartbreaking hope, now carried with them only a rib at days gone by.  She smiled.  “You wish.”

“The lady wounds me!”  Adrien’s laughter was contagious and she found herself chuckling.  She picked up a menu and he followed suit.  She didn’t know if this was a place he frequented often, but it was new to her and she needed to know what she ought to get.

It wasn’t long before she decided on her lunch.  She lowered her menu to find him still puzzling over his own.  Not a place he visited often, it seemed.

There was a time once when she would have been able to read him easily.  She still could, to a degree.  However, there were some things about even his mannerisms that had changed. Changes she hadn’t taken note of or kept up on.  When he was younger, he would have studied something with that serious expression that had been drilled into him.  Pinched eyebrows and a slight scowl.  Now, however, he held his tongue between his teeth.  A small difference, and one that suited him well, but a difference from the boy she knew nonetheless.

She knew when he was done, though.  His eyebrows went back to the middle of his forehead and he looked up with a smile.

“You look like you’re ready to jump off a building,” noted Marinette.  Adrien, to his credit, didn’t duck away from the topic when it arose.  Not like she often did.

“I _feel_ like I could jump off a building.”  Adrien’s face said one thing, that he was lighthearted and joking, but Adrien’s hands said another.  He fiddled with his right ring finger, gently twisting around the empty space.  Slowly, methodically.  Remembering.  And then, to her surprise, he released his hand and folded his fingers together.  “I miss them.”

Tikki’s face flashed across her memory.  The sweet goddess of creation who had helped her through so much.  Who had taught her how to be even more open and how to roll with what life threw at her.  Who encouraged her into shouldering her responsibilities with pride and balance.  A bright red figure with piercing blue eyes.  Encouragement and approval.  Marinette smiled.

“I miss them, too.”

The two of them sat in silence for a moment, each in their own thoughts.  It took Marinette a second to notice the warmth on her hand.  She looked up to find Adrien across the table, smiling at her gently.

“I think they’d be proud of us.  We’ve come a long way since Hawkmoth.”  Even now, he couldn’t hide the pain the word brought him.  But he was better than he had been before in the fact that he kept eye contact.  She squeezed his hand in return.

“That’s true.”  Marinette released his hand and he brought it back to his side of the table.  “You think they’d be happy with all of our choices?”

“I know Plagg would be,” said Adrien.  It was kind of sweet how instant his answer was.  “I think he’d just be happy that I’m finally doing my own thing.  He was really insistent about that.”

“I can imagine,” laughed Marinette.  Anyone who had truly cared about the boy had insisted on the same exact thing.  They had almost thrown a party when he had told his father that he was studying astrophysics instead of how to maintain a perfect model body.  “But what I’m getting at is how different our lifestyles are to each other.”

Here it was, the crux of the matter.  Adrien hummed in thought.  This was something she wanted to know.  More specifically, she wanted to know what he thought about their differing life styles.  They had both had impossible dreams and wishes when they were younger.  She wondered if he was truly happy with how everything had turned out.

“Well…  I guess it wouldn’t matter.”  That surprised her, coming from him.  She rose an eyebrow.  “Not to say that it wouldn’t matter _completely_ , but that they would have wanted us to grow anyways.  Grow in healthy ways.  And if that meant that we needed to grow apart, then it was probably better that they reunited with Master Fu and the other kwamis, because we would have done it anyways.  Probably because they would have encouraged it.

So, I think they would have been happy that we’re happy at the end of it all.  That we managed to still have normal lives after everything was said and done.  And, for what it’s worth,” Adrien pierced Marinette with a look she hadn’t seen since she was eighteen.  Eighteen and leaving Paris.  “I’m glad it happened this way.  I don’t think we would have lasted long together.”

She had no idea how badly she wanted—no, needed—to hear that until her shoulders released their tension and she sighed out a breath.  She had thought the same for years.  She wanted desperately to enter a world that left Adrien scarred.  Adrien wanted a steady, domestic life so badly while she wanted a career that had the craziest schedule she could think of.  While they were complimentary opposites, their desires were not balanced.  They simply didn’t want the same things out of life in the ways that truly mattered.  They were great friends and he was a fantastic partner to her, but not more.

Not anymore.

“Thank you.”  Adrien looked at her with a frown.  “I needed to hear that from you.”

He knew what she was referring to.  Even these years later, he still looked ashamed.  He turned away and scratched at the back of his neck.  A nervous tick, but she could see the regret in his actions.

“I can understand that,” said he.  “I didn’t take it very well when we decided it wouldn’t work.  And I know I made you uncomfortable.  With all the times I tried to _make_ it work…”

She was silent for a moment.  She remembered the attempts.  The not-so-subtle flirtations after they broke up.  The ways he would try to become close with her again.  She remembered the times he knew what he was trying to do because he stopped sooner.  Most of the times, however, she had been the one who had had to stop him.

In the end, she hadn’t had a choice but to leave him be.  He had been given a warning and she had left.  It had been hard on both of them, but the time and distance apart had seemed to have cured him.  He never really mentioned their past entanglement.

Until now.  Now, when he was formulating what to say.  She waited so he could figure out how he wanted to word whatever was going on in his head.  There might have been a time when she could have suspected what it was, but those days were gone.  Time and distance did that, too.

Finally, Adrien exhaled.

“Marinette, I am so, so, so, _so_ sorry I did that to you.”  He took a deep breath and, eyes still averted, continued.  “I was really disrespectful to you.  I kept hinting and pushing and I just didn’t stop until you left.  And I didn’t even _realize_ just how much you were hurting through it all…”

Marinette searched his face, looking for quirks she once knew that told when he wasn’t being completely honest.  The crease in his forehead, the tapping on his elbow.  Both were absent.

“I made you uncomfortable.  I did that to my best friend without thinking of the consequences.  I was _so sure_ that we were soulmates that I didn’t listen, and that’s not how any sort of relationship should go.  Least of all a friendship as close as the one I thought I had with you.”

“Well,” said Marinette, attempting to be lighthearted and forgiving.  “All you had were Disney movies and Chloé as your guide in love.”

Adrien looked at her and she knew that her attempt to make him feel better with humor had only worked slightly.  He still looked guilty.  “That isn’t an excuse.  Those were movies.  And Chloé was only ever interested in fantasy.  You were real.  You were my real best friend.  And I pushed my expectations on you until something _had_ to be done.  And I’m sorry I let it go that far.”

Marinette contemplated her answer.  To be honest, she wondered why this had never come up before.  It wasn’t like she hadn’t done her best to be open about discussing it.  And she had known that, on some level, he had felt responsible and guilty.  He tended to be so for a lot of things.

Their lack of up-front communication about their feelings was _another_ reason why they would never work.  They each had something they never wanted to talk about.  While they had both worked on it, they never managed to be on the same page in that respect.

“Adrien, it’s been years since that,” said Marinette.  When he looked like he was about to say something, she held up a hand.  She still had her piece to say.  He quieted down and waited for her.  “I don’t deny that it hurt me.  I didn’t _like_ having to do that, but it had to be done.  There were times I thought I’d have to give up and cut ties with you completely, and that hurt even more.

“ _But_ you didn’t stop trying to get over it, through it, or whatever you had to do.  I hated watching it happen, but it was something you had to get through.”  Marinette looked up at Adrien, not surprised to see his jaw slack and eyes wide.  He seemed a bit pale and she didn’t blame him.  He had never heard about how close she had come to washing her hands of the entire ordeal for her own health.  “We got through it.  We’re done.  And now we’re friends.”

Marinette watched as the color slowly returned to Adrien’s face.  Watched as he processed the information.  Watched as he finally seemed to accept that everything—really, _everything_ —was over.  Well and truly done with.  He heaved the same sigh that she had a few moments ago, finally seeming sincerely at ease for the first time since he entered.

“Yeah,” he smiled, leaning back against his chair with that same grin he’d had as a boy.  “We’re friends.”

With a smile, Marinette waved down a waitress and hoped that they would be for a long time yet.

**Author's Note:**

> tbh, I imagine Marinette with Luka in this one, and he is 100% okay and supportive of the friendship between Marinette and Adrien because he knows how important Adrien is to her. And Adrien doesn't have anybody, but he's enjoying his own life and making sure he knows what he wants for himself before getting anyone involved in that. (take it or leave it, guys. XD)
> 
> But yeah, I hope y'all enjoyed this!


End file.
